Waltzing Down the River with Johann Strauss II's The Blue Danube
The Best Moments
The Blue Danube, Op. 314
I'm Johann Strauss II, and what follows are the best moments of my waltz The Blue Danube. You'll meet the passages that made this waltz the customary finale of the Vienna New Year's Day concert, so you'll understand why it closes the celebration. On this site, my fellow composers and I also teach you to recognize our pieces whenever they play, so give the Trainer a go and see.
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A Very Polite Way to Clear the Throat
I begin in A major with the violins shimmering so softly that you lean in to check whether anyone has actually started. Then a lone horn sings the tune, and a little later I arrive at the first waltz in D major, like a host who has finally stopped fussing and opened the front door.
Five Waltzes and Not a Dull Moment
Once the dancing starts, I string five waltz tunes together and let them drift through keys such as B-flat major, G major and F major, so the music never sits still long enough to get bored. It began in 1866 as a choral song with cheeky words about a lost war, and its title comes from a poem by Karl Isidor Beck, which is why you shouldn't expect the real Danube to be especially blue.
The Bit I Fretted Over
I'll confess, as the story goes, that the coda is the only part I ever regretted, since I'd hoped it would be a bigger success. It has certainly had the last laugh, because it closes the Vienna New Year's Day concert as a matter of custom and is often called Austria's unofficial second national anthem.
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Well, that's the end of my little tour of The Blue Danube, and I hope it left you humming a little. Did you enjoy learning about the best moments of The Blue Danube? I like to think of this waltz as a piece that rewards a second visit, because once you know where the quiet opening leads, you start to hear the whole thing a bit differently. There is still plenty more to explore, from the story of how a song written after a lost war found its way to Paris, to the many places where the music has turned up since. The waltz now closes the Vienna New Year's Day concert, and it also drifts through Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, so you may have heard it in more places than you realized. If you'd like to keep going, please click on the links below and see where the river takes you next.